Rick Perry and the Struggle for Civil Rights and a Lower Tax Rate

It took one visit, on my first day in Chicago, to a liquor store on South Stony Island, late at night, to convince me that I was a White, liberal, do-good honkie.

I had moved from California, where I had worked to integrate a White city. I understood racism, but I didn't know what it felt like until that night on South Stony Island Avenue. It made me scared. Angry. To want to piss in my pants.

Rick Perry knows just how I felt. Rick is the Governor of Texas. He wants to be President of these United States in order to make everything a little bit more like Texas.

They don't have buses in Texas--at least not for real Texans--but Rick has heard about sitting the back of them, and about separate drinking fountains, and slavery and Jim Crow laws and all of that. And they have a lot of happy immigrants from Mexico--some of whom were there first--who are as happy as larks to work for minimum wages. Rick knows all about Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevards!

Probably because of the dedication of the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., they asked Rick to say a few kind words in honor of the occasion. Rick said that he understood the struggle of Black Americans for their civil rights. It was a lot like the Republican struggle to get a lower tax rate, he said.

Rick has been there! You know, separate fountains for those who pay corporate taxes. Millionaires in the back of the bus. Separate schools for rich kids; having to buy their own iPads.

Maybe it is time to elect a president who had done there, been that!

Some day, if there is still space on the Mall, we might see a monument to Rick, maybe hunched over the big end of a telescope, discovering little tiny things.

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